alt Hacker NewsI'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA
Hey gang, you may remember me from such books as _The Lean Startup_ and _The Startup Way_.
It's been fifteen years since I wrote The Lean Startup, and in that time I've seen some things. In both big companies and tiny startups, NGOs and governments, in almost every industry you can name.
I've helped a lot of people create a lot of amazing companies, but I've also seen so many ways this can go wrong. There's a darkness in our industry that we often don't talk about.
I kept watching good companies drift away from the missions they were founded on. Not because anyone woke up one day and decided to be evil, but because the structure they were built on slowly pulled them there. I call that pull "financial gravity."
We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.
My new book _Incorruptible_ is my attempt to explain the invisible forces that shape organizations, and how a handful of companies (like Costco, Patagonia, and Novo Nordisk) have successfully been structured to resist gravity and thrive for decades -- or even centuries.
Along the way, I founded the Long-Term Stock Exchange, co-founded an AI R&D lab called Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard, and helped a number of notable companies with their governance (yes, including Anthropic).
I won't pretend I have this all figured out, but I've probably spent more time than is healthy on the "why do good companies go bad" question. Ask me anything!
Comments
Hey Eric - does it bother you all the startups in your first book you held up as examples are dead?
You said build-measure-learn principles survive AI. But when an MVP costs hours instead of months, doesn't the bottleneck move entirely to distribution and customer development?
What type of software businesses survive and thrive in the era of AGI? Which ones get wiped out? Is there any moat in the era of AGI?
Novo Nordisk is a good company? News to me.
Big fan of your work!
Let's say this has already happened and ossified across large, formerly-innovative companies that now have so much size and inertia behind them that it might take decades for one to "fail" in a traditional sense. What can be done to reverse the process?
How do you use AI on a daily basis, and are there times when you don't?
To what extent are the mechanisms you identified causing companies to go bad the same for non-profits, associations, political parties, etc.?
Does "financial gravity" imply that noble missions are generally less profitable? Is there a way to align that (maybe by governments structuring the market with taxes / regulations)? Is that realistic?
Hey Eric, I loved The Lean Startup! One of my favorite books. Really looking forward to reading Incorruptible.
Thoughts on the modern trend of "AI tokens used" as a metric for performance, growth and efficiency by both startups and multi-national giants alike?
Are the lessons you have distilled applicable to other institutions in society which decline due to corruption? How is corruption different from your concept of financial gravity?
Do you support the current efforts to go from quarterly to semiannual corporate reporting in the way it is playing out in the current administration?
Hi Eric. In this day and age, and in the next year or two, what do you foresee as the most practical first steps for someone to work towards delivering a startup for income they can sustain themselves on?
And how has the traditional loop of validation, delivering and iterating on products, and getting your first paid customers changed since fast output is now possible with AI and technology?
Please structure this for someone with no startup experience, and such that event a child can understand. And please create a version that works for someone to begin to validate their idea right now and measure progress, and modify/iterate towards a goal of money generation for themselves or a team now and long-term. (And would you also describe then how this person can work on attracting a team for someone who has never successfully navigated choosing their own team before.) (And would you also accept my thanks, this is very kind of you)
"Darkness we don't talk about" — sir, that's just every Slack thread after an all-hands. Pre-ordering anyway!!
How much of the "financial gravity" do you attribute to VCs?
I've noticed that VCs try very hard to separate the world into "VCs + founders" and "everyone else" and that the more time a founder spends in the VC+founders bubble the more distorted their worldview can become.
Well, what does "lean startup" mean in this AI age? what changes? what stays the same?
What have you always wanted to achieve but haven't managed to do (yet)?
Huge fan of lean startup. With being able to build MVP in hours with AI, has the "build-measure-learn" loop collapsed into something fundamebtally different? Or did the bottleneck moved elsewhere?
What do you think are the most important problems that the US is currently facing?
Hi Eric, former IDEOer here. I know you spent some time at IDEO observing how we work. In my time there (2014-2024), it felt like most clients misinterpreted "MVP" to mean "the absolute lowest-effort barely-working code that we can rush out to say we shipped something." When they did manage to ship a low-quality MVP, they had no budget for maintenance or iteration. Basically, they shipped a rushed, crappy product, and some of them concluded "well, Lean, Agile and Design Thinking are all BS. We should go back to waterfall."
Sometimes clients asked IDEO to design under this shitty-MVP model (we generally refused), other times we were brought in to clean it all up.
Why do you think the concept of "MVP" was almost universally misunderstood? And, thinking about Incorruptible, how did the best companies out there internalize it?
Book recommendations?
What parts of The Lean Startup would you update for the AI era?
What do you think are the hallmarks of a great company mission?
The only thing that can topple Patagonia is Pattie Gonia
Why are CEOs/CTOs not being fired or put on PIP for the ill-conceived internal AI push?
does this apply for a company of every type? does it work for companies like apple as well?
Eric, The Lean Startup had a huge influence on how I think about startups and product work, so first: thank you.
Given the current wave of AI-assisted coding (Claude Code/Codex) and the broader enshittification of SaaS/platforms, do you think B2B SaaS founders now face a new "we can just build this ourselves" problem?
How would you think about testing for that risk early?
What does "Best Seller" mean in this context? Who says it's a best seller?
AMA, AN
Why do you anthropomorphize companies? Is it to absolve individuals of responsibility?
> We've all experienced watching a company we love or admire be warped and broken beyond recognition; until it's a husk of its former self, or worse. I wanted to understand why. And I wanted to know what all of us can do to stop that from happening.
You give advice on startups, yet the two Startups mentioned raised lots of money and have not achieved any real success.
Those who can do, those who can't teach?
I've noticed a lot of founders are building bigger and bigger things and still calling it MVP. Thoughts on how to focus the energy to more customer development than product development early on? Wasn't that the point? Focus on the high risk part?
This feels like this is exploring the reasons for what Doctorow calls "Enshitification" which is really exciting.
I would love to know more example of good and bad companies
yoo, what's up gng, had breakfast?? (Can't think of any questions to ask)
HR has been receiving a lot of positive and negative attention over the last 8 years, culminating lately with some CEOs notably eliminating the HR org entirely. Do you see HR as a positive , negative or mixed force for driving “Incorruptibility “ ?
Books like this are for tech bros what horoscopes are for sad old ladies.
They are full of platitudes that sound relevant to people's problems and desires, that pretend to be based on science but have no actual basis in facts, provably do not work, and yet are still popular amongst the people they let down again and again.
Anyone who could write a book with advice that worked the way this purports to would be too rich to need Kickstarter to fund his books, for a start.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Costco is interesting.
I've always find it an interesting dichotomy between their public image, retail worker reputation, and corporate reputation. The former two are fantastic. I live in Seattle metro area where they are headquartered, and the last is horrible.
I've had more than one recruiter tell me it's a classic, blue collar, "we've always done it this way" environment since many of their corporate people rose through the ranks in stores, not tech. As I believe Warren Buffet put it, "every company is a tech company these days," so this creates problems. I met someone at a party there about three years ago tell me a data migration went so poorly, they'll have to use two financial systems for at least ten years because the previous system was homegrown with ancient tech.
As an ENTJ, the later would drive me crazy, and I've declined when recruiters want to talk to me about such and such manager position at Costco.